Enemy Agents (12 page)

“Exactly. I tried a few. They work. Anyone with this list can get into your system. I mean, there are firewalls around the important stuff, but they have access.
To the secure site
.” She leaned in and whispered. “Someone who works for GX is stealing information from the CIA. This is hard proof. You can bust them now. My job’s done.”

Smith nodded and put the pages back into the folder. “I’ll need the thumb drive.” She nodded and passed him a small USB stick.

“So what now?” she asked, turning her head to look at both of them.

“You go back to work. Live a normal life until the arrests come down, then quit the company. But for now, don’t do anything to get noticed.” Smith spoke in a voice that sounded less spiteful, a sort of practiced kindness that sounded entirely phoney. He was trying to reassure her, but his total lack of empathy made it hollow. “You’ve done a great job. Keep your head down and you’ll be fine.”

“So I just go back to work this afternoon?”

“Exactly.”

She closed her bag and sipped her coffee. After a pause, she turned to Quarrel. “Are you going to be around for a while? Should I have your contact information?”

Smith interrupted. “Chris is just learning the ropes. I’m the agent in charge of your file.”

“Oh.”

“I’m going to use the restroom. Be right back.” She stood up and walked off without hesitating, taking her bag with her.

She didn’t come back. After ten minutes, Smith chugged the other half of his water, crushed the plastic in his fist, and tossed it onto the table. He cracked his knuckles. “I’m going to look for her. Stay here.”

Quarrel waited while Smith investigated first the women’s room, then the men’s, then checked for a back exit. He came back after about a minute.

“There’s a back door that leads into the building. She’s gone.” Smith took out a cell phone and dialed. He waited through several rings and hung up. He picked up his briefcase, packed away the manila folder and the thumb drive, and started to leave. He turned to Quarrel almost as an afterthought.

“This is not how it usually goes. She got spooked. I’ll find her. It’s what I do. I’ll be in touch.” With that, Mr. Smith slipped out the front doors and into the Manhattan morning, leaving Quarrel to find his way back to his hotel, or wherever he wanted to go.

Analyzing what had happened, he decided he still didn’t like Smith, and still thought of him as a prime suspect.

Quarrel grabbed an abandoned newspaper from another table and read the local sports while finishing his coffee. One good thing about NYC: they have hockey coverage. Years in Ottawa had converted him to a Senators fan since there wasn’t any other sports team in the area. The Sens were playing the Islanders that night
.
God
,
realized Quarrel
,
I haven’t even read this stuff since the bombin
g
. It took about ten minutes for the coffee to go down, at which point Quarrel realized that just about everything in the paper seemed so trivial compared to his mission. He decided to hail a cab and go back to his hotel to contact Milton and wait for Smith.

On the street, he flagged down a yellow cab and was one leg into the back seat when a woman called out.

“I’ll split that with you.”

Maggie Reville climbed into the cab beside Chris.

“What are you—”

“I’m going where you’re going.”

Quarrel gave the name of the hotel to the cabbie, and they rode in silence.

Back in Quarrel’s second-floor hotel room, she finally opened up.

“You’re new in town, right?”

“Just transferred in.”

“To the CIA?”

Quarrel shrugged.

She was really working up some anger now, talking loud and fast. “And why exactly would the CIA transfer an agent to the FBI?”

Shit. Smith had been pretending he worked for the FBI, Quarrel had shown her the wrong ID, and now she was suspicious of the whole operation. Why couldn’t Smith have been more talkative and filled in little details like what agency he was using as cover when dealing with the asset?

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“How long have you known him? Smith?”

“We met this morning.” Quarrel was starting to realize where this was going.

“You trust him?”

“Do you?”

Maggie sighed. “I want witness protection. When I broke into the servers, the hacking program worked, but they detected the intrusion. GX knows I was poking around in their servers, and I
cannot
go back there.”

“Why not tell Smith?”

“Because I just can’t trust that guy. It’s hard to pinpoint, but I get this vibe off him. It’s like he hates me or something.”

“I know what you mean, but—”

“The last two times I told him where I was getting information, the sources dried up. One was an old records room nobody really organized. I found a lot of questionable billing practices, thought they were ripping off the government. That was what got me started when I went to the FBI. But once I told Smith where the information was coming from, they removed all the files. The next source I found was a secretary who told me that the company was getting payments from some Swiss account, but without ever sending bills to anyone that would explain what the money was for. Once I told Smith, the secretary was fired and I couldn’t find any record of the payments. You see what I mean?”

“So you think Smith is trying to protect someone at GX who’s stealing secrets. But why would Smith recruit you if he worked for GX?”

“He didn’t. I spent the first month reporting to some guys at the Federal Building, and then Smith transferred in and took over my file. He never let me contact anyone else, until you showed up today. I thought maybe you were there to investigate him or something.”

Quarrel fought back a smile
.
Clever woman.

“So you want me to get you to safety, and without Smith or the FBI knowing about it.”

Maggie smiled. It was the first time Quarrel had seen her smile. Her sour, unhappy face suddenly became quite lovely. Her curly blonde hair bounced as she nodded.

“And I’d like it if you guys would get my stuff from my apartment. I haven’t been back there since last night when I got caught with my hand in the cookie jar.” She opened her messenger bag and pulled another file folder and another thumb drive. “I made backups of everything since I knew Smith would just bury it.”

Quarrel waved his hand toward the drab hotel room. “Make yourself comfortable. I have to make a call.”

Quarrel almost dialed Milton’s number, but at the last second he changed his mind and decided that he’d rather throw a bone to Hinkston at the CIA. It might help if Hinkston owed him a favour. Quarrel dialed the number on Mr. Hinkston’s business card. A female secretary answered. It took a while to get the agent on the phone. Once Quarrel could actually speak to the guy, it was pretty simple to arrange a pick-up for his first witness. Hinkston only had one condition.

“I want every last shred of information that woman has. If she’s got stolen CIA material, you’re turning it all over to me. Your investigation does not grant you access to CIA plans.” Hinkston, as before, sounded bitter and angry. Quarrel agreed to hand over Maggie’s files.

Quarrel wanted to know what those strange blueprints represented, but he knew he didn’t have long to review them. He couldn’t make copies since he knew Maggie would tell the CIA everything, and if he took her USB drive and made copies from it, they’d know. The last thing Quarrel needed was the CIA hunting him down in the middle of the investigation. After hanging up the phone and telling Maggie about the plan, he spent some time trying to decipher the strange, complex blueprints. He couldn’t make sense of any of them. It wasn’t really a building, although it seemed to be huge. It wasn’t a schematic for a machine, although power lines ran everywhere. Whatever it was on these CIA plans, Quarrel couldn’t piece it together.

Half an hour later, Maggie, the papers, and the USB drive were bundled into a van. She thanked him for his help, shook his hand, and disappeared into Manhattan traffic along with every piece of real evidence Quarrel had.

15

William Thorpe lay in a king-sized bed smoking a cigarette. Other than the silk sheets, he was nude. His clothes were scattered around the room, leaving a trail that outlined the passions between Thorpe and this night’s conquest. The girl’s black lingerie also littered the room. It was a sprawling, modernist penthouse at the top of an expensive hotel, lots of cold concrete and minimal furniture. The sound of the girl’s shower echoed through the large bedroom from the half-open bathroom door. Between drags on his cigarette and sips of his champagne, Thorpe looked to the doorway. Wisps of steam that flowed out and faded into the bedroom’s musky air.

The girl was the personal assistant to the head of the multinational corporation, Globection Corp. That man was Hugo Zoeli, the famous self-made man. Zoeli had started a small independent cellular phone business in the late 1980s, and now he was a worldwide communications leader and defence contractor.

Globection was everywhere. Twenty years ago they were a private infrastructure firm, setting up high-end communications in America and Europe, and water systems in South America. From launching their own satellites, they had gotten into aerospace development, which led naturally into weapons contracts with the United States and NATO allies. Soon, Globection was providing soldiers of fortune—
“
private contractors
”
—for Iraq and Afghanistan, as well providing as the internet, phone, and water services vital to the war effort. A soldier going to war in Iraq in 2005 would have flown there on a GX plane, ate GX food, drank GX water, and phoned home on a GX internet connection. And when his time in the army was over, that soldier would be offered a contractor job as a GX security envoy, doing the same job for triple the pay. There were many who felt that if GX were to cease to exist, so would the United States military.

Thorpe knew he had to figure out who was selling GX’s information to Martin Mercier, but to do that he needed to know who had the access codes to the top-secret intelligence. And to know that, he needed an in. Seducing Zoeli’s assistant was a good start.

She was very resourceful and had an intelligence that bothered him. He always felt like she was thinking three moves ahead whenever he spoke to her. But like so many young women in proximity to powerful men, she was gorgeous, and Thorpe was a man who appreciated gorgeous. Now that he had bedded her, it would be easier to gain her trust, and eventually to turn her to his side. It was an ugly truth of the spy game that you needed to turn an innocent into an ally. Thorpe was used to turning women into honeypots when needed, but he did feel a faint twinge of regret at knowing that she could suffer for his actions if Mercier suspected she was helping him. Women had been hurt and killed because of Thorpe’s charm. More women than he liked to admit, but if this mission brought him the man who put a bullet in Julia’s brain, that would help Thorpe sleep at night.

His cell phone rang. Answering it, Thorpe saw the face of the Ringmaster. They spoke over video chat, and Thorpe didn’t care that he was talking to his boss while he was obviously naked in bed.

“Good evening, Triple Eight.”

“Evening, sir.”

“Hard at work as usual.”

“Aren’t I always?”

“Are we alone?”

“For the moment.”

“Two things, Thorpe. The first is that Harry Milton wants to know your location. He won’t tell us why, so we’ve held back the information. But you can call if you feel like it, since I know you and Harry go back quite a bit. The second thing is the woman you asked us to check into. We’ve run her name and her photo and it seems she’s not who she claims. You’ve listed her as Diana Torrens, assistant to Hugo Zoeli of Globection. But she’s not. Diana is almost fifty and at least a hundred pounds heavier than the girl you’ve met. She’s playing you, Thorpe.”

“Good to know, sir. I’ll be in touch.”

He hung up. The girl was still in the shower. Now things were interesting. If the girl wasn’t with Zoeli, then why had Thorpe spotted her inside his office? Thorpe pondered whether it was possible he had shagged the very mole he was hunting without realizing it, and silently cursed himself for thinking with his libido instead of checking the girl out first.

Thorpe climbed out of bed and started to pull on some clothes, pulling pants over the bruises that lingered from being tied up in Nice. He seemed to take longer to heal now that he was older, but thought his body was still in fine shape otherwise. Once he had his pants on, he reached under the pillow and pulled out his Glock 19, and waited for the shower to shut off and let him know that the girl was coming back.

She had been in there for almost twenty minutes. Thorpe listened to the sound of the water. It was steady and constant. He realized that the sound was so uniform, there was no way a person was moving underneath the stream of water. Either she was standing dead-still under the water, or she wasn’t in the shower at all.

Thorpe gently pushed the door open with his foot and entered the steamy bathroom gun-first. The fog was so thick he could barely see, and the heat hit him like he had opened an oven. Reaching the shower, he grabbed the curtain with his left hand, his right holding the gun. He jerked the curtain hard, intending to surprise the girl, but there was no one there. The tub was empty. The girl was gone.

Thorpe was struck by two questions: how had she gotten out, and what good was it to sleep with him and leave? If she had tried to kill him, that would at least make sense. Instead, she had simply vanished.

He studied the bathroom. There were no windows, but there was a large vent at the bottom of one wall. A sufficiently lithe young woman might have been able to fit in there. He pulled the plastic grate off easily—it was not screwed in place. Looking inside, the vent ran straight vertical. She could have gone up or down, no way to tell, but this was definitely her escape route. One question answered.

In the bedroom, Thorpe picked up her champagne glass and sprinkled it with fingerprint powder from his bag.

Once several prints were visible, he took a high-res scan of the prints and emailed them. Then he made another video call, this time to Ms. Cashmere, who handled a lot of different jobs for MI-7’s ten ‘Triple’ agents.

“Kathy, I’m sending you prints. Top priority.”

“OK. I’ve got them. Hold on a second.” She waited for her computer to run the prints. “Oh, are you shirtless? Do pan down and let me have a peek.”

“Oh, Kathy. You haven’t the proper security clearance to view all of my secrets.”

She grinned at him before her eyes flicked away, back to the computer. “No positive ident. But those prints have been suspected to belong to a cat burglar and assassin who goes by the name Fatale. Also known as Rochelle Noir, Sasha Black, and Inga Palme. Why, William, were you spending the night alone with Miss Palme?”

“That’ll do, Kathy. Tell the Ringmaster that the woman in the photos is Fatale. We can at least put a face to her now. Talk to you in the morning.”

Thorpe finished getting dressed, and tucked the gun into a holster under his left armpit. Beneath his tailored suit jacket, the gun was invisible. He left the bedroom and passed into the penthouse’s Spartan living room. He hated minimalist living spaces, preferring European glitz and comfort over modernist urban-style spaces like this. When the girl had brought him here three hours prior, he was shocked at how empty and cold it felt.

Now he was shocked by another sight. Between the blocky, angular armchair and the equally blocky couch, a wide pool of red had spread across the polished concrete floor. There was a corpse lying face-down in the blood, a young man with a knife jutting from his blood-soaked back. The man was dressed in suit pants and a dress shirt, and looked to have been stabbed several times. There was no doubt that he was dead.

Thorpe was impressed by how fresh it all looked. Either Fatale had only just killed the man minutes before, or someone had staged it all while Fatale kept him occupied in the bedroom. It had been just over twenty minutes since Thorpe had seen the girl, and in that time she had vanished from the bathroom and, maybe, planted the body as well. She wasn’t just skilled, she was borderline supernatural. Thorpe knew he had been set up as soon he saw the body. The pounding on the door only confirmed it.

“NYPD! Open the door!” shouted a man outside the door. Thorpe didn’t answer. Instead, he grabbed his briefcase, went straight to the spacious balcony and started looking for an escape route. The walls were too flat to climb either up or down. As this was the penthouse, there was no neighbouring apartment he could jump to. He was stuck.

The police officer banged on the door, and Thorpe was sure they would break the door down within seconds. Desperate, he lifted his right foot and opened a compartment in the heel of his leather shoe. He pulled a thin string from inside the opening and set the foot back down, his feet together. He looped the string through a tiny, near imperceptible hook on the heel of his other shoe, then tied the end of the line to the railing.

As the door burst inward, the first police officers into the apartment saw the body, but didn’t notice the fifty-year-old Englishman out on the balcony. In those brief seconds, Thorpe climbed onto the railing, extended his arms forward, and jumped. Thorpe fell freely for about twenty stories before the line started to tighten and his descent slowed. As the line stretched and Thorpe felt his champagne-filled stomach shift in his body, it occurred to him that he had never actually used this line before, even if it was rated to three hundred pounds. The best-case scenario was that the line and the knots held, and Thorpe was pulled quickly upward, where he would smash against a wall or a window. The worst-case scenario was a face-first trip to the sidewalk.

Looking to prevent both of those results from happening, he fired a small line from his watch, which dug into the floor of a balcony on the seventeenth floor. He pulled the line tight, just as he felt the bungee line try to jerk his ankles back up toward the penthouse. For a moment he dangled there, seventeen-and-a-half floors above the street, upside-down and hanging by his heels and one wrist. He tossed the briefcase onto the balcony, then he swung his legs around, angling his body toward the balcony below, and with a click of his toes, the line in his shoe released. It whipped away, springing back up toward the penthouse, and he expertly flipped feet-first to the balcony.

Detaching the line from his watch, Thorpe made a mental note to refill both of his escape lines. There was no way to pick the lock on the sliding glass balcony doors, so Thorpe was forced to swing his metal case through the glass. The sound of the shattering glass woke the couple who were staying there, and the husband jumped from the bed, flicking on his lamp, but before he could see anything the door to the hallway was closing and Thorpe was gone.

An hour later, in a 24-hour diner that served him tea and toast, Thorpe called CIB. Harry Milton, the man who seemed to never sleep, answered. Milton did not take video calls, so this was an ordinary phone call.

“Milton. Triple Eight. Please tell me that you were looking for me to warn me about the female operative who was slinking her way through New York.”

“Not at all. What happened?”

“She disappeared out a room that only had one door, which I was watching, left me a fresh corpse and called the police.”

“Tonight? How long ago?” Milton sounded more interested than usual.

“Just an hour ago. Why?”

“We had something similar happen. Some young woman hit one of our safe houses. Broke a fugitive right out from under us last night. She was only on the camera for a few seconds.”

“Doubt this was the same girl. Mine’s been in the GX office all day. What did you want to talk to me about, Milton?”

Harry paused. “Nevermind that now. You find your girl, I’ll find mine.”